4D LUT: Learnable Context-Aware 4D Lookup Table for Image Enhancement

Image enhancement aims at improving the aesthetic visual quality of photos by retouching the color and tone, and is an essential technology for professional digital photography. Recent years deep learning-based image enhancement algorithms have achieved promising performance and attracted increasing popularity. However, typical efforts attempt to construct a uniform enhancer for all pixels’ color transformation. It ignores the pixel differences between different content (e.g., sky, ocean, etc.) that are significant for photographs, causing unsatisfactory results. In this paper, we propose a novel learnable context-aware 4-dimensional lookup table (4D LUT), which achieves content-dependent enhancement of different contents in each image via adaptively learning of photo context. In particular, we first introduce a lightweight context encoder and a parameter encoder to learn a context map for the pixel-level category and a group of image-adaptive coefficients, respectively. Then, the context-aware 4D LUT is generated by integrating multiple basis 4D LUTs via the coefficients. Finally, the enhanced image can be obtained by feeding the source image and context map into fused context-aware 4D~LUT via quadrilinear interpolation. Compared with traditional 3D LUT, i.e., RGB mapping to RGB, which is usually used in camera imaging pipeline systems or tools, 4D LUT, i.e., RGBC(RGB+Context) mapping to RGB, enables finer control of color transformations for pixels with different content in each image, even though they have the same RGB values. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in widely-used benchmarks.